Basically I would need to use my Sony Vaio F12 laptop to edit HD wedding videos on CS5. I wanted some opinions on my equipment so i will be able to edit a long project(about an hour to 2 hours) smoothly with no dropped frames, errors, system crashes, etc. So I would basically i need a setup that can keep up.

I know I would at least have to use an external HD from the video and audio. I have a 1TB Samsung Story external USB and another 1 TB one that is eSata but am having problems with the esata port on the Sony.

Would this be adequate or would their be some obvious areas that you could see causing problems? I'm thinking the USB external might cause a bottleneck for one.

USB drives should only be used for backup, they are way too slow for editing. eSATA is the best choice for externals.

6 GB memory is bare minimum for comfortable editing of HD material. You did not mention what format your HD material is. If it is HDV, you may get by with the Sony, but not very fast. If it is AVCHD, it will feel like editing in slow motion.

In the PPBM5 Benchmark there are two i7-720QM and two i7-740QM machines near the bottom of the results page, which is where your Sony would probably end up.

In short, it is doable, but do not expect any speed or performance. For a notebook and serious editing, you need something like a Sager (also in the benchmark but way up in the list).

So if it comes down to it looks like I would have to bump up the ram to 8. Also the external is the biggest hurdle as you pointed out.(Does anyone have recommened solutions for esata that they use?)

I'm actually not even sure on the format yet as in I might have to deal with a number of them. Lets say the format was AVCHD and I was having major problems with speed. Is there codec equilvant in CS5 to the ProRes in Final Cut? For example in Final Cut you would transcode everything to ProRes to avoid having to render. Is there something really good like that for CS5?

CS5 edits in native format, so AVCHD material is edited as such, nothing like ProRes on a MAC. The GT330M video chip in the Sony can be 'hacked' to allow hardware MPE, which means you mostly would not have to render your timeline for realtime playback or only small portions, depending on the effects/transitions used.

I remember reading about the hack that forces CS5 to use the Video Card for rendering. Do you think the GT330M would benefit from the hack because I remember there was something about the number of Cudas and what type of memory will determine the performance increase. The GT330M has

48 Cuda cores and DDR3 memory. I wasn't sure where the cutoff was.....

The assumption for why there is negligible performance gain is incorrect. If they changed the speed of the CPU and had an understanding how CUDA works they would probably have seen that. The GPU can only perform as well as the CPU allows it. What this means is the CPU has to process the threads before sending the appropriate data to the GPU for processing via the System ram. There are many factors that effect CUDA and especially performance with the MPE. The biggest though is the processor. If you set a GPU monitor utility, you can monitor the activity on the GPU while the CPU is at stock speed and then at overclocked. You will see a sizable difference in performance/usage on the GPU and GPU ram based on the speed of the CPU. What this tells you is that the GPU may be the best performing you can get but it will sit more than 90% idle if the CPU is taking to long to process the data it requires. CUDA sends threads to all available CUDA cores and is not limited at all like CPU threading. It literally just throws threads out there to the cores in simple terms. The assumption is incorrect in the link you reference.

I have a Sony Vaio F12 for location work. I have 8 gig of ram in mine and use the esata connected to an external 7200 rpm HDD.

I have been doing a lot of my paid location work for about 6 months with this setup and I am very happy with it.

It has not caused me any problems, yet. However the projects I work on are usually quite short (I am sure it will get bogged down with larger projects).

As has been said its wont be as slick as some of the more expensive workstation laptops but it does work and represents excellent value if you are on a tight budget.

I am currently using CS4 to edit footage off a Panasonic GH1 and a Canon 7D. I am upgrading to CS5 soon and I will try the hack for the 330m GPU.

Hope thats helpful.

Ben

Hey Ben which model external are you using by chance?

My 1 tb Samsung Story is a no go for the eSata. I'vs tried everything I can think of and it just doesn't work with the Sony. The USB does work. I have read problems with that model and other computers with the eSata port.

I am using a 2 year old lacie model. It has its own power supply. Dont know if thats the reason it works.

I did read that about some problems with this laptop and 'power over eSATA'.

I get very acceptable result working with 720p avchd footage making 5 - 10 min clips with this setup. I have tried editing a big project on it but it was vey sluggish.

I am hoping for a small speed boost when I put CS5 on it with MPE enabled on the 330m gpu.

Does CS5 perform better than CS4 with its new engine, even without MPE enabled?

B

Hmm...Yeah my Samung Story also has its own power supply and no dice. From what I can tell Lacie seems to work with the Sony. I was reading on the Avid forum, and the two other guys were using Avid Media Compser 5 with success on the Vaio and were using Lacie drives as well. I think I am going to order up this Lacie drive

I have no idea if CS5 has any advantages on CS4 without MPE. I am going to try the hack soon.

The only other solution I can think of with dealing with bigger projects is transcoding footage to something else like how they use Prores422. But apparently nothing is like that in the Adobe Premiere world.